Artificial intelligence devices now entering the marketplace

Here are some new consumer artificial intelligence breakthroughs entering the robotics marketplace.

Frank Tobe, The Robot Report

04/16/2014

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Talking, mobile, and personal robots in our homes may be in the future, but they don’t presently exist except for in research labs around the world. Many new artificial intelligence breakthroughs, hi-speed Cloud services, and software apps for speech recognition and processing are enabling new companies to build low-cost devices that provide some of the services we can expect 10 to 20 years from now.

Stationary Devices:

Emospark, a UK start-up, just completed a successful IndieGoGo crowd-funded campaign for their new home artificial intelligence console. Emospark is an Android Wifi/Bluetooth cube with which users can interact through conversation, music, visual media and from any type of remote device.

Cubic Robotics, a Moscow-based startup that recently displayed their device at a robotics conference in Moscow, is competing with a similar device, but only in Russia at first. The Cubic is an electronic assistant that can understand and recognize voices and commands from distances up to 10 meters (they have a 16 microphone beam array) and can provide services such as reading news, reporting traffic conditions, providing tutoring and wake-up, and calendar reminders and it has a social personality.

Emospark and the Cubic offer spoken communication and both have worked on voice recognition up to and beyond a 1 to 2 meter range while compensating for noise and reverberation. Both are then using the Cloud to parse through

spoken commands, determine the contextual intent, and then process those commands. Both have developed voice capture, speech recognition, and command interpretation software.

Mobile Robots:

Adam is a mobile personal robot designed and produced in Milan, Italy, by Hands Company SRLS. Their goal is to produce a low-cost personal robot. Adam can communicate with home devices so you can control lights, appliances and thermostat. It has an autonomous navigation system and can move independently inside your home. It can act as an entertainment console, be used as a mobile telepresence device and do video surveillance.

Giraff is also a mobile personal robot but it is designed to work with and monitor senior citizens in their home or care facility. Using a network of sensors in and around the home, as well as on the person, blood pressure can be taken, and the system can detect if the person has fallen down. It also has a Skype-like telepresence capability to allow relatives and caregivers to virtually visit with the senior. GiraffPlus is an EU-funded project to develop a robust network of environmental and physiological sensors and provide intelligent services that can extract from incoming data and provide alarms to enable timely responses, all the while providing similar telepresence, entertainment and calendaring services such as those described above.

Frank Tobe is the owner and publisher of The Robot Report. This post originally appeared on The Robot Report.

Real artificial Intelligence most likely will be introduced in the next 12 to 24 months since a working analog synapse has been announced. Robots will then become more human, a communication device a mobile iphone with arms, but will they be creative?